Thursday, September 9, 2010

No Your Limits was created with one simple goal: to inspire people everywhere through stories of wounded warriors using adventure to overcome adversity. Evey day, the men and women of our armed forces face down the dangerous job of ensuring our freedoms, and fighting for the freedom of others, in places around the world. Some return with a variety of injuries and disabilities physical and emotional.

Many of these wounded warriors have found adventure and adrenaline to be a very powerful part of their ongoing recovery. Our mission is to create opportunities for these warriors to find further healing through some of the biggest adventures out there.

The first "mission" of No Your Limits is an adventure unlike any other: the wounded warriors of NYL will travel to Isla Guadalupe in the Pacific Ocean, and swim with the most fearsome predator in the water, the Great White Shark.

Leading the expedition will be the experienced professionals of Shark Diver, who bring decades of experience to the adventure. For five days, the NYL crew will explore the waters that have become known as a "gathering place" for great white sharks. Filming the expedition will be a documentary film crew, which includes one of the most talented underwater photographers working today.

Future missions will follow the NYL warriors and crew from the jungles of Central America to the roof of Africa. The soldiers profiled in No Your Limits refuse to let their lives be defined by adversity. Instead, they choose to surf, to cast, to climb, and to leave any preconceived idea of what’s possible far behind. We hope you will support NYL and our ongoing mission to provide and share these inspirational stories of adventure.

From the RTSea Blog today, Baskers off the California coast have now been declared by NOAA.

So what does this mean?

NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, took a slightly unusual step by declaring the eastern North Pacific's basking shark a "species of concern." While it sounds a bit like a suspect in an unsolved homicide, what the designation actually does is recognize that the basking sharks that migrate along the coast from Canada to the central coast of California are not recovering in numbers as expected since the taking of basking sharks commercially was curtailed in the 1970s.

The importance of a government scientific agency taking a step like this is that it essentially greases the wheels for marine scientists to consider the basking shark as a study subject. With NOAA's acknowledged concern, the designation can assist scientists in seeking funding for research projects.